Reconceptualizing the Archaeology of Southern India

Peter Johansen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. His research and teaching interests focus on issues of politics, social distinctions and inequalities, landscape production, materiality, metallurgical production, ritual, and representational practices, particularly in South India’s ancient and medieval pasts. He is codirector of the Maski Archaeological Research Project, an ongoing multi-disciplinary archaeological field project in South India. He is also interested in the historiography of South Asian archaeology and the contemporary politics of Indigenous heritage sovereignty in Canada. Andrew M. Bauer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University and the current director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. His research and teaching interests address the history of archaeological thought, archaeological method and theory and environmental anthropology, with particular emphasis on South India, where he codirects the Maski Archaeological Research Project. He is also interested in the intersections of landscape histories, spatial production, and modern framings of nature as they relate to the politics of conservation and climate change.

Introduction: Reconceptualizing the Archaeology of the Deccan: From Periodization to Practice; 1. Culture History, Relative Chronology, and the Invention of ‘Prehistory’ on the Deccan: Historizing and Reconceptualizing the Production of South India’s Past; 2. The Maski Archaeological Research Project and the Sociality of Settlement Landscapes; 3. Mortuary Differences and the Making of a Commemorative Politics in the Precolonial South Deccan; 4. The Techno-Politics of Crafting: Ceramics, Lithics and Iron in the Long-Term; 5. The Political Ecology of Agro-Pastoral Land Use Over the Long-Term; 6. Archaeology and the Politics of Practice